He had not even power to try, and his heart thumped.
London's Whitechapel Countess glided before him like a candle in the fog.
He had accused her as the creature destroying Romance.

Was it gold in place of gilding, absolute upper human life that the ridiculous object at his heels over London proposed instead of delirious brilliancies, drunken gallops, poison-syrups,--puffs of a young man's vapours?
There was Madge and the donkey basket-trap ahead on the road to the house, bearing proof of the veiled had-been: signification of a might-have-been.

Why not a possible might-be?
Still the might-be might be.

Looking on this shaven earth and sky of March with the wrathful wind at work, we know that it is not the end: a day follows for the world.
But looking on those blown black funeral sprays, and the wrinkled chill waters, and the stare of the Esslemont house-windows, it has an appearance of the last lines of our written volume: dead Finis.

Not death; fouler, the man alive seeing himself stretched helpless for the altering of his deeds; a coffin carrying him; the fatal whiteheaded sacerdotal official intoning his aims on the march to front, the drear craped files of the liveried, salaried mourners over his failure, trooping at his heels.
Frontward was the small lake's grey water, rearward an avenue of limes.
But the man alive, if but an inch alive, can so take his life in his clutch, that he does alter, cleanse, recast his deeds:--it is known; priests proclaim it, philosophers admit it.
Can he lay his clutch on another's life, and wring out the tears shed, the stains of the bruises, recollection of the wrongs?
Contemplate the wounded creature as a woman.